🏆 In the last 5 years, Telegram surpassed Facebook Messenger to become the most popular cloud-based messaging app. Telegram is now second only to WhatsApp and is closing the gap year by year. No wonder our competitors are concerned! 🔥

For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests that we receive are related to Stories.

Initially, we were against this since Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn't be Telegram if we didn't listen to our users and didn't innovate on existing formats.

So we will be launching Stories soon – in the Telegram way:

- Privacy. You will be able to define who can see each of your stories with granular precision: Everyone, only your contacts (with exceptions), a few selected contacts, or a list of Close Friends.
- Compact UI. Stories will be placed in an expandable section at the top of your chat list, which makes them easily accessible without taking away valuable space.
- Flexibility. It will be easy to hide Stories posted by any contact, moving them to the 'Hidden' list in your Contacts section instead of the main screen.
- Captions. In addition to making use of dozens of powerful photo and video-editing tools, you will be able to provide captions for your stories to add more context or links and tag other people.
- Dual Camera Support. Building on the success of Telegram's Video Messages, we're adding the option to post photos and videos taken by the front and the rear cameras simultaneously.
- Optional Ephemerality. You'll be able to choose when a story expires – in 6, 12, 24, or 48 hours – or permanently display stories on your profile page, with individual privacy settings for each.
- More suprises! 🤩

The ability to save your stories to the profile page will make Telegram profiles more informative and colorful. You will not only be able to explore more content from your closest contacts, but finally discover more information about users you connect with in groups or channel comments.

Speaking of channels, they will benefit from more exposure and subscribers: once we launch the ability to repost messages from channels to stories, going viral on Telegram will become a lot easier.

Overall, following our internal tests of Stories, even the skeptics on our team started to appreciate this feature. We can no longer imagine Telegram without it.

Stories are in their last testing phase and will become available in early July. This will herald a new era on Telegram, where it will become even more fun and social than it currently is.

Check out a preview of Telegram Stories in the next post.

🥳 Today Telegram turns 10 years old.

In just a decade, Telegram gained over 800 million active users purely thanks to word of mouth. Through numerous updates and improvements over the years, Telegram has redefined what a modern messaging experience should be like.

The next step for Telegram is to go beyond messaging and spearhead innovation in social media in general. We should use our popularity to change the lives of billions for better, to inspire and uplift people on our planet.

Today’s gradual roll-out of stories for all users marks the beginning of this new stage in the history of Telegram. While this past decade was exciting, the next 10 years will be the time when Telegram reaches its true potential. 🥳

🔍This month we changed how searching public channels and groups works on Telegram.

Previously, public channels with more subscribers would appear higher in the search results. That system worked fine for a while, but was increasingly getting abused by spammers. That's why we now only count genuine subscribers of channels for ranking.

For example, channels with more Premium subscribers will generally rank higher. However, if a specific Premium subscriber joins too many channels, they won't give those channels as big of a search ranking boost. Of course, the new search also prioritizes results from your country.

The feedback on this change is overwhelmingly positive. Channels with an inflated subscribers count have become less visible, while useful groups and mini-apps are now attracting more users. 🚀

Some people are wishing me a happy "birthday" today.
But today, 10.10.2023, is not really the day when I was born.

I was actually born many years ago – today is merely an anniversary of my birthday.

Personally, I prefer to celebrate it as the 12th anniversary of my 27th birthday anniversary.

Don’t let yourselves get misled! 🍸